“I have just read Theo’s book this morning and have the following observations. As an Amazon reviewer myself, he has got it EXACTLY right. It is specific to Amazon, to answer other queries, but Theo is a very experienced reviewer and what he says about the ‘Amazon Jungle’ is 100% correct, from my own less detailed findings.

This book is mainly about what not to do when soliciting reviews for books (or products) on Amazon, as well as good advice on how to approach the same thing correctly.

Free today on Amazon – click to download

Anyone who is already marketing or considering selling via Amazon should definitely read this short book first. It gives a priceless insight into the thought-process of the reviewers and explains the voting system, and reviewer rankings far better than anything else I have ever read. He gives inside knowledge about the various shills and tricks used by some people and companies, and detailed information on how to avoid being lumped into these unpopular groups.

Some of his best tips in the book should be known by anyone wishing to sell anything on Amazon, especially books:

Do not solicit reviews from family and friends who do not usually review anything else. It will be obvious to both Amazon, and to the top reviewers too.

Do not encourage anyone to leave a negative response to reviews that are unfavourable. This is known as ‘Negging’, and also becomes obvious.

Avoid getting involved in a group of writers who all post rave reviews of each others’ work. These are known as ‘Circles’ and are also easily detected.

If you want to contact the top reviewers, look at their profile page for contact details. If they do not have an email address, they might have a Facebook page, blog address, or their own website.

The book is full of gems like this, and really is a ‘must read’ for sellers. Use the valuable links he provides, to increase your knowledge of just how the Amazon review system works.

36 Comments

I read this book over the weekend. The tips and advice are quite good. Also, I like how well Theo explains the thinking behind his suggestions. He makes a good case for standards of professionalism, which I think is a must for all self-pubbed authors. I would recommend it for sure.

I’ve not personally run into any problems in reviewing for ‘friend authors’ and haven’t seen these authors have problems reviewing for each other. However amazon does have a strange system and sometimes it detects that people are friends and I’ve heard of amazon deleting so called ‘friends’ reviews. The fact I’ve never encountered it though makes me wonder whether it really is amazon’s system that does this or whether it’s because some people have complained. There’s really no way to tell. Plus I am on the UK site and the system might be slightly different there.

That’s a good question. I’ve had some people contact me that their reviews are rejected and they have no reason. These are blog followers that I interact with, which would be weird for an Amazon system to pinpoint. Maybe it’s a combination of reports and the system.

If reviews have been rejected when trying to post them I’d definitely advice everyone to retry posting them. Sometimes amazon will post a review it previously rejected if you just omit one or two words. Sometimes it seems to dislike my reviews if I use one word too many times and in one case I’ve heard somebody re-post a review by changing nothing and the system accepted it.
I once posted a review, it got ‘stuck’ for a few hours and then after a few hours I was told it was rejected. I then reposted it taking one word out and it was instantly accepted and instantly posted.
The machine that accepts or rejects reviews is automatic so don’t take it to heart and tell everyone to try again. Sometimes it’s a computer program misbehaving. Tell your blog followers to try reposting their reviews or rewrite a sentence here and there, more often than not it will be accepted 🙂

Some tried again while others settled for Goodreads or their blog only. It’s rather disheartening to submit one and it get rejected. Many people, not only with me, don’t even know why they get banned. I do worry that me telling people to try again can be misconstrued as pushing for reviews. I lost a 5-star a year ago because somebody thought a person was related to me, so I get really iffy on doing anything in regards to reviews.

Unfortunately amazon’s own system is a bit messed up. Even experienced amazon reviewers who’ve been doing it many years complain constantly at how unfair amazon is in deleting reviews. I had one book review deleted I didn’t even know it had been deleted until I one day looked the book up. I have no idea why that review was deleted or why it was only deleted on the UK site and not the US site.
I can understand you not wanting to push for reviews though, who knows how amazon link people together.

I have never seen that error 😮 !
Amazon does seem to detect that if you ‘like’ more than 3 of somebody’s reviews you are classed as a friend and therefore the votes don’t count or get deleted but I don’t know how else amazon detects friendship.

It’s amazon’s way of stopping fan and troll voting. amazon is good at stopping trolls voting down reviewers reviews but the flip side is that if you like somebody’s reviews too much then your ‘likes’ won’t count. Even more daft is the idea that one negative vote cancels out 3 likes/helpful votes….Nothing at amazon makes sense really! I’ve been a reviewer there for about a year and a half and nothing ever makes sense! lol And they’re always changing the system so who knows what we’ll be discussing about amazon next year! 🙂

Yep, that’s why amazon reviewers get so angry/competitive in the forums sometimes (and authors should never ever visit those forums asking for reviews-it’s an unpleasant place). I try to not let it bother me though and let my reviews speak for themselves. No point in getting worked up over something we cannot change :).

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